Genre in a Changing World Academic Writing Motta Roth

8/12/2019 Genre in a Changing World Academic Writing Motta Roth

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16 The Role of Context in Academic TextProduction and Writing Pedagogy

Dsire Motta-Roth

INTRODUCTION

Te problem of text production in academic genres has been a challenge forundergraduate and graduate students as well as for writing teachers from differ-ent departments. Previous research has provided important results on the struc-tural aspects of academic genres (Swales, 1990) and the discursive construction

of identity in academic writing (Ivanic, 1998). However, few studies have con-centrated on the contributions of exploration and reflection on context to ac-tual teaching practices. From the perspective of Systemic-Functional Linguistics(SFL), in this paper I would like to focus on the reciprocal relationship betweentext and context, i.e., the way context can be recreated by analysis of text andvice versa. Te aim is to point out some practical implications derived from theuse of SFL principles in academic writing teaching and research through contextexploration. Te focus will be on writing activities that aim at fostering students

awareness about the connections between contextual features (activity, identity,relations as well as the role performed by text in the situation) and their respec-tive linguistic realizations (expression of content, instantiation of relationshipsbetween interlocutors, and organization of text).

One of the main challenges in language education and research is to teachcreative ways to negotiate the norms of the language system (grammar) withinthe academic culture: the set of meanings, rules, values, power relations andrelevant genres that constitute the social practices of a community. Educating

students about the uses of language in specific contexts depends on clear descrip-tions of the connections between text and context.Public discourse on academic publication in Brazil is mainly issued by

the Ministry of Education through its two main Research Funding Agencies,CAPES and CNPq, which hold quantitative and qualitative expectations aboutscholars intellectual production but offer no substantial line of financial sup-port for pedagogic research and course development. Tus full-fledged writingprograms are seldom found in Brazilian universities. Very often what we find

is some individual or collective teaching initiatives that have survived defyingall the odds (e.g., lack of personnel and financial resources) situated in specificinstitutions.

In my context of pedagogic practice in academic writing at the Federal Uni-


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versity of Santa Maria (UFSM), I personally started to offer a course on academicwriting to graduate students in 1994. Since then, I have been offering the courseto a multidisciplinary class, made up of Masters and PhD students. Tese new-comers to academia often feel that the task of writing research genres demands

substantial and detailed formal instruction. My aim is to foster students aware-ness of how the language system operates in different academic genres in termsof semantic field (content), interpersonal relations (effect), and text structure,so that they can engage in text production in order to appropriately performrelevant activities according to (a) their own interests and (b) the conditionsand constraints of the cultural context in question. Te pedagogical approachpresented here is focused on students situated practice and the cultural contextof their discipline. I would like to think of it as a transformative practice.

In this paper I consider how theory works in practice, drawing practical impli-cations, especially from Systemic-Functional Linguistics, to the teaching of aca-demic writing and reflective thinking about the academic context. It differentiatesitself from other previous texts that describe writing pedagogy approaches (as theseveral ones described in Zemliansky & Bishop, 2004) in that it identifies specificissues and questions that can be explored with students in order to develop theirawareness about the discourse of science in their own disciplinary areas.

CHALLENGESINTHEACADEMICSETTING In the academic context, the challenges in teaching writing to newcomers aremany:

Discourse events are dynamic linguistic activities that combine so-cial and cognitive resources in meaning making, complex dynamicsystems in action, with people as agents in social systems, usingother complex systems of language and other semiotic means

in interaction with each other (Larsen-Freeman & Cameron,2008, pp. 161-162, 186)1; Centripetal and Centrifugal forces interactin discourse (Bakhtin,

1986). In other words, genres are intersubjective representations ofevents that are constructed with reference to our shared experienceof recurrent discursive situations. Tus they are relatively stable.

At the same time, genres are social processes and thus dynamic,realized in different registers (Martin, 1992). Te research article

genre, for example, is differently realized in Applied Linguistics andElectrical Engineering concerning form and style, as different reg-isters of the same genre;


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The Role of Context in Academic Text Production and Writing Pedagogy

Novice writers must negotiate meaning considering the disciplin-ary culture they are new to (Swales, 1990; 1998) at the same timethat they keep in perspective the existing power relations and ten-sions in their local disciplines and in academia as a broad cultural

site (Ivanic, 1998); and Systemic knowledge is not enough to accomplish both of the above

tasks, which depend on ones understanding of the meaning poten-tials that situations offer (Bakhtin, 1986).

Tese challenges seem more reasonable if we consider language learning astwo interrelated steps: we learn to interact and thus learn the language that isconstitutive of that interaction (Halliday, 1994).

In my own teaching practice, there are additional specific challenges:

I teach a course that lasts 15 weeks, with weekly 100-minute meet-ings with a multidisciplinary and multilevel academic writing class(PhD and Masters students from Chemistry, Rural Sciences, Edu-cation, Law, English, among other areas), therefore we need to ana-lyze the different discursive practices (processes of text production,distribution, and consumption, according to Fairclough, 1989)

into which students must acculturate; Learners are usually novices or junior scholars with different expe-

riences in writing (mostly masters students and PhD candidates) Learners make different choices for genres in which to write their

texts (research project, article, dissertation/thesis chapter).

Tese various challenges have to be considered and recontextualized in myteaching practice in order to answer a range of questions such as the following:

How do we foster learners textual production competencies? How can we teachlearners to function within academic genres to engage in disciplinary discourse?And maybe even more importantly: how can we help them develop an academicidentity as authors (Ivanic, 1998, pp. 26, 219, 341)? In order to comment on possible approaches to these questions and chal-lenges, first I will discuss the relationship between academic text and context,taking into account the concepts of genre and register. Secondly, I will explorethe pedagogic approach that I call Academic writing cycle an approach that

I have developed throughout the years, based on previous research on academicgenres and my own teaching practice with inexperienced academic writers. Fi-nally, implications of this approach for academic writing teaching will be drawn. In order to examine text production in the academic setting, language will


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be defined as a semiotic system with different planes of signification within theSystemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL) framework. In addition, discourse will beseen from a socio-historical perspective as an intersubjective, social and historicalphenomenon, as expressed in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (1986; 1929/1995).

THE RELATIONSHIPBETWEENACADEMICTEXTANDCON-

TEXT

In SFL terms, the context in which a text is produced can be recreated byanalysis of textual language, and the opposite is also true (Halliday, 1989). Fromthat perspective, if genre is a socio-discursive process, then the teaching practicemust develop learners reflexivity about the relevant social context to use it as ascaffolding device to explore texts in a meaningful way.

Both text form and meaning are socially constructed and respond to demandsof immediate circumstances and cultural tradition (Jamieson, 1975, pp. 414-415). ext and context are thus mutually predictive(Halliday & Martin, 1993,p. 22). As I will argue later, awareness about this bidirectionality (as dialectics inthe work of Bakhtin, 1986; Fairclough, 1989) between text and context allowsstudents to situate their text in the system of genres (Devitt, 1991; Bazerman,2005) that structure academic interactions and thus helps them see the connec-tion between the text they write and the research activity.

Definition of the academic context as a culture and disciplinesas situations My teaching practice has always included the analysis of students text andthe observation of their struggle and my own to write and become an academic

writer. Tis teaching and writing experience finds expression in Charles Bazer-mans words:

I found that I could not understand what constituted an appropri-ate text in any discipline without considering the social and intel-lectual activity which the text was part in. (Bazerman, 1988, p. 4)

In order to define the social and intellectual activity which the text was partin I have resorted to SFL perspective on language, genre, register, and text2.

Academic discourse, genre, register and text

Academic discourse can be described as the linguistic expression and con-struction of concepts, values and practices shared by members of an institu-


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tion characterized by technical language and researching, teaching, learning andpublishing practices that are constituted in different genres and registers. In SFLterms, language is a system of meaning creation, that is, a system in whichmeaning is the product of the interrelations among the parts of the system of

language and context (Martin, 1992, pp. 497-498). Both genre and register areoriented to the context.

In the broad Context of Culture (Halliday, 1989, p. 6), defined as theactions and the meanings (and the values attached to them) produced by themembers of a social group, genresare these members intersubjective representa-tions of the types of situations and texts that recurrently co-occur in that socialgroup and thus distinguish it from other social groups and their respective cul-tures.

In the Context of Situation (Halliday, 1989, p. 6), defined as the environ-ment of the text, the set of meanings that is possible/probable (potentially avail-able) in a given situation, register is the configuration of semantic resources thatthe member of the culture associates with a situation type (Martin, 1992, p.498). As an example, we can think of the research article as thegenre(in oppositionto the book review, the dissertation, etc.) that is consistently different in content,format and style when used to report a research in applied linguistics or in rural

sciences, thus in two different registers(Motta-Roth, 2003). Te textis the con-crete realization of these social-linguistic processes of genre and register choices.

Te relationship between context, discourse, genre, register and text can bevisually represented in Figure 1 in terms of the several planes in the overall sys-tem of language.


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1: (- ) (- , 1992, . 496; , 2005, . 6).

ext, register and genre are three levels of realization (or instantiation) of thelanguage system. Te genre the most abstract one is a staged, purpose-oriented set of actions in a discursive event recognized as such in a given Contextof Culture (the research article in academia). Te register is the configuration ofmeanings that realize the genre in the Context of Situation (the research articlein applied linguistics for the Brazilian Journal of Applied Linguistics). Te text

is the immediate concrete plane of language instantiation (my article). It is thisset of relations between planes of realization that the inexperienced writer will beworking with to situate not only their own text but also their writing and read-ing practices. In my particular teaching practice, academia is viewed as the Context of

C

ONTEX

TT

E

X

T

Discourse: Ideology

Genre: Contextof Culture

Register: Context

of Situation

Semantics & Pragmatics

Lexicogrammar

Phonology &

Graphology


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Culture: a set of concepts, values, and beliefs that typically go together, associ-ated with university life, with which students, faculty and personnel interactthrough texts. Each individual students experience of a discipline as a Contextof Culture can be seen as a distinctive Context of Situation for texts. Tese

Contexts of Situation can be defined in terms of three SFL variables that findcorrespondence with linguistic variables that define the register of the situation:

Field the nature of the social practice: the activity, the actionsoriented towards a communicative aim by participants of a givensituation/event (Bronckart, 1999; Vygotsky, 1986; Kuhn, 1970). Itis represented by lexicogrammatical terms (verb, noun, adjective,adverb);

enor participant roles, relations and interactions: the nature ofthe connections between participants in the event, their roles andrelations. It is represented by the Mood and modality features ofthe text;

Mode text organization: the nature of the semantic unit in use,its cohesion and coherence, the nature of the medium of transmis-

sion, its written/oral format.

Each genre then is realized in the form of a particular register that finds itsconcrete realization in a particular text. Te identification of the context vari-ables of academic practices within which we write is fundamental to become aproducer and consumer of academic texts. If we want to get an insight into theconfiguration of a text, we must try to understand the nature of the social prac-tice, of the activities occurring in the relevant context, the situation participants

roles and relations, and the way these conditions are construed in the text witha certain organization. By presenting language as a socio-semiotic system that constitutes the prac-tices of each social group (instead of a set of independent texts) we help inexpe-rienced writers to get initiated in academic culture (a system of meanings to beunderstood).

NETWORKINGTHE WRITINGPROCESS

Students learning how to write usually find helpful the Academic writingcycle, which I developed based on previous research on academic writing andgenres (Bazerman, 1988, 2005; Swales, 1990, 1998, 2004; Swales & Feak, 1994;Motta-Roth, 1998, 2001) and on my own teaching practice with inexperienced

writers at UFSM since 1994.


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Tis Academic writing cycle presupposes the idea that text and context aretwo sides of experience that must be pedagogically explored in writing coursesin order to foster students critical awareness of the kairosof a text (Bazerman,2007, pp. 119-149), the adequacy in content, form and style of a text to a

rhetorical moment. Tus lack of writing experience can be translated as lack ofunderstanding of how text production fits a given context of situation.

ext and context as two sides of experience Understanding how a text fits a rhetorical moment depends on awarenessof how a text constructs an institutional context (law system, science, school/university, business, etc.). wo simple (and to a certain extent obvious) argu-ments motivate the activities of the Academic writing cycle: first, in order for

students to become writers in their field, they need to become discourse analysts(to produce the texts that are adequate in the discipline, they must learn toread these texts, learn how they function by analyzing not only linguistic formand content, but the interactions that these texts construct and structure); andsecond, in a crossdisciplinary classroom, students from different fields need torealize how language works from a sociointeractionist perspective, that is, theyneed to understand that texts work differently in each field depending on thenature of the activities each area of study conducts and the kind of relations the

participants maintain to produce knowledge.Vygotsky (1986, 1984/2007) and Halliday (1994) both state that we learn

the language we speak because we interact in the contexts that use that languageto conduct social activities. I have synthesized this view in my own terms:

As learners come to realize the social arrangements of their envi-ronment, they develop reflexivity upon the rules of grammaticaloperation and text structures. Learners need to reflect on context

and text, on how texts contribute to context dynamics.

Tis view offers a set of implications for academic writing that can be sum-marized in three Discourse-analytical principles that guide my pedagogic prac-tice:

(1) In order to understand the uses of formal elements in language, learnersmust reflect upon their context;

(2) o be able to write, novice writers need to analyze the relationship betweensocial practices and texts, comparing what they have been able to deductfrom their observation with the texts produced in this context (journals,


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books, dissertations, book reviews, etc.),focusing on how research activi-ties, social roles and relations are constructed in texts;

(3) o learn a language, learners must learn to analyze discourse(McCarthy &

Carter, 1994, p. 134). By reading and deconstructing exemplars of pub-lished texts from a lexical, grammatical and discursive perspective, learn-ers will learn to write, revise, and edit their own texts more effectively.

By adopting these three principles, learners develop discourse-analyticalabilities that will help them fine-tune their text form and content to a pro-

jected audience, thus avoiding the writing-in-the-vacuum syndrome (writ-ing without a purpose and an audience in mind) that might arise when taking

a text-focused or process-focused writing course. Based on these three principles, I elaborated a writing cycle that encompassesthree sets of activities:

(1) Context Exploration involves learning to interact with the environmentin order to learn the language, observe research practices and understandthe role of language in knowledge production practices;

(2) ext Exploration involves experiencing analytically the relationship be-tween text and context, how language appropriately constructs the con-text and vice versa, by analyzing genre systems and genre sets;

(3) ext Production, Revising and Editing involves becoming a discourseanalyst by writing, revising and editing ones text as well as other class-mates, focusing on how linguistic resources are used for engagementand participation in social and discursive academic practices.

Te objective in educating novice writers to think of writing as a cycle ofcontext and text exploration-text production-text revising-text editing is to takethese writers from the actual stage of accomplished development in their writ-ing competencies (in Vygotskyan terms, their Zone of Real Development) to aricher, more informed and elaborated stage (their Zone of Potential Develop-ment) in which they are able to write with a certain amount of autonomy toexert their authorship. Tis process is done with the help of the teacher and of

the participants of the disciplinary context in which these novice writers want toparticipate (as a Zone of Proximal Development, where the tasks are performedwith the help of a more experienced partner) (Vygotsky, 1984/2007). Te ob-servation of the context functions as a scaffolding device to help novice writers


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project the kind of text that may interact with the relevant context. Te activities in the writing cycle (context and text exploration-text produc-tion-text revising-text editing) are arranged as an academic writing network ofthree sets of questions and tasks (Motta-Roth, 2007) presented in the following

section.

Te Academic Writing Network

Activity 1: Context ExplorationTo understand the uses of formal elements in language, learn-ers must reflect upon their context, the social conditions underwhich texts are produced and consumed.

Tis first set of activities is geared towards students learning of how to inter-act in academia in order to learn the language. In the first class, I ask learners toobserve research and social practices in their environment (laboratories, researchgroups, project teams, etc.) and to reflect upon the role of language in knowl-edge production practices. Before reflecting about grammatical rules or basictext structures, learners observe the activities and interview participantsin labo-ratories, offices, meeting rooms, etc., about their research and writing practices.

In addition, learners search for reference material (books, research articles, bookreviews, dissertations, theses, short communications, etc.) that is valued in theiracademic context. Students are given a set of exploratory questions they should try to answer,acting as ethnographers that are curious about a community and their social anddiscursive practices:

(a) Which research practices are used in your area? Which research projects

are presently being developed in your research lab/group?(b) Which research concepts and problems are practiced in your area? Whichare the relevant research topics for the people in your lab/group?

(c) Which approach to a specific topic seems more interesting?(d) Which preliminary readings were you advised to do?(e) Which are the renowned journals in your area?(f ) Which genres are relevant in your context?(g) Who publishes where? Who reads what?

(h) Do you intend to publish your text? How can you do that?

Usually, the class takes two meetings to discuss the results of their survey,


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to learn how to look for journals available in their area more effectively andto search through these journals more productively. After starting to write, thelearners attention will be called to different sections/genres in the journals intheir areas and the different functions they perform, how to browse more ef-

ficiently through a text in order to decide if it is worth reading it extensively.Te result of this activity is that students get aware of the main genres availableto them and delineate their writing focus, determining the journal to whichthey will submit their papers, therefore avoiding the writing-in-the-vacuumsyndrome again.

As they identify certain topics that seem to be of greater interest to them, westart delineating the semantic map for each students text by using key-words, asseen in one students example in Figure 2.

2:

Te example in Figure 2 was constructed by one of my students as a planfor a paper about the research he was conducting on the susceptibility to Am-photericin B of immunodepressed patients suffering from Candidemia and thepharmacological parameters that should be established in order to identify thebreakpoint in treatments with the drug3. Similar semantic structures are used as general frameworks for students plan

for their research article in order to help them keep track of the basic whats(topic), whys (objective), and hows (methodology) of their studies.

Immunodepressed

Patients

Pharmacological

Parameters

Susceptibility to

Amphotericin B

CandidemiaBreakpoint


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Activity 2: Text ExplorationTo understand how language appropriately articulates itself ina given context and to revise their text more efficiently, novicewriters need to analyze the relationship between social and dis-

cursive practices.

Phase 1: Genre systems and genre setsLearners observe the activities and texts in the laboratories, of-fices, meeting rooms, etc.

Tis first set of text exploration activities involves the analysis of genre systemsand genre sets. Genre systems instantiate participation of various parts in the pro-

cess of knowledge production: researchers, peers, students, department heads, edi-tors, book shops, libraries, target audience, etc. (Bhatia, 2004, p. 54). Te systemindicates the importance of interaction in various (oral and written) texts such asresearch proposals, advising sessions, talks, articles, books and book reviews, forthe establishment and functioning of specific communities (Devitt, 1991, p. 340).In addition, the concept of genre systems is diachronically important because ithelps us realize the way various genres result from former texts and influence futuretexts (Devitt, 1991, pp. 353-354). Tat is, interrelated genres may follow upon

another in particular settings, because the success conditions of the discursive ac-tions of each require various states of affairs to exist so the intervention of each ofthe follow-up genres will have consequences for other genres and correspondingspeech acts that follow in the enactment of social intentions (Bazerman, 1994, p.98).

I believe that students can write more effectively if they can visualize how theirresearch article occupies a position in the network of academic genres that struc-ture the life of their research group, as the example shown in Figure 3 of the

genre system that articulates the social interactions and activities at the Readingand Writing eaching and Research Laboratory (ReWrie Lab) where I work atUFSM. Within this system of genres that define a social group, there are also the setsof genres that are instantiated in the everyday life of the group, the texts thatstructure the daily routine of a research community (Bhatia, 2004, p. 53).Troughout the day, abstracts, book reviews, articles, research proposals,books, chapters, proceedings, etc. are produced in part or whole inside an

academic group whose members share interests and aims. Novice as well asexperienced writers must develop awareness of how these genre systems andsets structure their experience in the academic context.


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3: - ( ) , z

Phase 2: Text and context relationshipsLearners compare lab activities to the texts produced in thatcontext, focusing on how research activities, social roles andrelations are constructed in language.

Te second set of activities studying the relationship between text andcontext is an attempt to develop students reflexivity on the relationship be-tween discursive practices and social practices.

Some of the questions the students have to research about are:

(a) Find exemplars of a relevant published genre (a well-succeeded inter-action) in your disciplinary context. What is their usual extension inpages? How are they structured/divided?

(b) What type of information is recurrently found?(c) What information seems central to you?(d) Which text stages are frequently found? Which speech acts are performed

(statement, questioning, promise, order, etc.)(e) What semantic fields do the texts cover/refer to (plants, people, animals,objects, texts, etc.)?

(f ) Is it possible to identify patterns in the lexicogrammatical choices, i.e.,

1. Research project(interactive processoriented toward anaim);2. Advising sessions(institutional activityeminently discursive);3. Talks;4. Defenses;5. Books;6. Book Reviews;7. Notes, memos,proposals, applicationforms, resums, etc. . . .(intertextual socialprocesses).

Etc. . . .


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processes (verbs), participants (nouns), circumstances (adverbs), etc.?(g) What research processes, participants, and circumstances are referred to?(h) How do you define the authorspersona (distinctive personal style in writ-

ing)? Are the ideas stated in a straightforward way or does the author use

hedging to make statements? How?(i) Are there signs of dialogism or polyphony? Does the author acknowledge

the reader in the text? Is the text open to difference of opinion? How?(j) Are there signs of intertextuality? Do you recognize vestiges of other pre-

vious texts? How?(k) How do you think academic writers should project their identities in

their texts?

Tese questions bring the learner from the contextual to the textual space,fostering their curiosity and critical eye about how texts are essentially relatedto the social practices of a given context, recreating it, recontextualizing it, ina resemiotization of previous experience.

Te aim here is to make an ethnographer out of a novice researcher/writer.Usually, the class takes two meetings to discuss the results of their text explora-tion, to take a look at the exemplars of genres they have collected in their com-munity. Te result of this activity is that students develop textual awareness,

identifying linguistic elements that realize certain functions at certain parts ofthe text (as in Swales, 1990; Swales & Feak, 1994; Motta-Roth, 2001; 2007).

Activity 3: Text Production, Revising and EditingLearning a language means learning to analyze discourse.

Te third set of activities becoming a discourse analytic producer of texts is focused on the writing process itself. At this point learners will concentrate

on textual features as they write, revise and edit their texts and those of theirclassmates. Tey analyze discourse as they are producing text or as they read it. Te starting point is often the analysis of a published text in order to developlearners sensitivity to linguistic features, analytical competencies of textual lan-guage. Te awareness gained by these exercises can be used in text production interms of the writing itself and of the revision stages. Questions to guide the development of analytical competencies in writingand revising are:

(a) How are the sentences connected in the text? What is the basic textstructure?


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(b) Which element is in initial and final position in each sentence?(c) Can you identify text stages that correlate with steps in the research

process?(d) Are there expressions that signal text organization (theme/rheme, con-

juncts, subordinators, lexical signaling)?(e) Do the connectors express addition, opposition, cause, consequence, etc.?

What kind of connector can be found in each text stage?(f ) Do concepts get defined? How?(g) Are research steps described? How? Is the vocabulary more emotional or

objective, more descriptive or more argumentative?(h) Which actions are represented in the text? Which processes are reported

by which verbs/verbal phrases?

(i) Are there action verbs that suggest material processes (e.g., catch,emerge, develop, dissolve, increase)? Or that suggest mental pro-cesses (e.g., think, predict, plan) or verbal (e.g., declare, sug-gest, indicate)? Are there processes that establish relations, classify oridentify entities (relational processes, expressed by verbs such as be,become, have, seem)? Or processes that express existence or be-havior (associated with the senses or body functions)? How are theyused in the review of the literature or in the methodological sections,

for example?(j) Who are the participants in the actions represented in the text (expressed

by noun phrases)? Can you identify the relationship among them (au-thor-reader, researcher-object-phenomenon)? What tone is used by theauthor, e.g., symmetry/asymmetry (expert/expert, expert/lay person),friendship, impersonality, informality, formality, etc.?

(k) Which nouns and adjectivals can be associated with the circumstancesdescribed in the methodology, for example?

(l) Which interdiscursive elements are in the text, i.e., that simulate conver-sation, self-promotion, recommendation, etc.?(m) Does the author make self-reference, reference to the reader or other

groups? Which words or pronouns are used for that?(n) Which verb tenses are used? Is there verbal, nominal or adverbial modal-

ization? What kind of modalization is used, epistemic or deontic?(o) When is passive or active voice used? Are the agents of the actions explic-

itly mentioned in the text?

(p) Which among these linguistic features do you think fit to adopt in yourown paper?


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Tese questions (and their paraphrases) focus learners attention on the lexi-cogrammatical features of the texts they read and write. Te aim here is to de-velop learners awareness of the linguistic system and its uses, the text structure,content and style.

Usually, two-thirds of the twelve classes are dedicated to revising, criticizingand rewriting the texts of three or four students each day. Each week the classdebates a section of the paper, its function and textual configuration, linguisticfeatures, etc., so that at the end of the twelve weeks, each student has a completepaper that has been developed along the course.

Te sets of activities in the Academic writing cycle are represented in Figure4.

4: ( -, 2001)

Te figure shows a writing cycle as an activity network. Te first phase ofthe cycle starts with the unidirectional arrows, with activity 1 leading to ac-tivities 2 and 3. Tis phase is completed with learners first attempt to write atext relevant to the context they have in mind. Te subsequent phases change

the cycle into a network, because learners can continue from any activity atany moment, and any activity can occur at any time, lead to any next activityand even occur at the same time of other activities. Tus learners can go backand read more about the chosen topic before revising their text, or can revise


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the text before looking for more information, or can revise the text as theyrewrite it. In the following section, I will project some implications of the present ap-proach for the teaching of academic writing.

IMPLICATIONSFORACADEMIC WRITINGTEACHING

Awareness of how the language system operates in terms of semantic field,interpersonal relations and text structure can help students appropriate thesystem to serve their own interests according to the conditions they identify intheir immediate research context. We can help novice academic writers devel-op writing abilities by leading them to explore social and discursive practices

within their disciplinary culture. As novice writers learn to write, they need toconsider contextual regulations (in Bakhtins terms (1986) centripetal force)as well as social, and therefore dynamic, collective discursive practices (cen-trifugal forces). With Bazermans initial quote in mind (one needs to comprehend the ac-tivity to understand the text), students first task is to observe their actualacademic environment in order to build a framework to better understandhow academic discourse and knowledge production practices are dialectically

constructed. exts are then seen as socio-rhetorical processes and artifacts, i.e.,tools writers use to realize goals and carry out activities within a complex setof social relationships constrained by the goals sanctioned by the disciplinarycommunity (Haas, 1994, p. 44). Novice writers can be educated to develop an academic identity by helpingthem to decide what to write, to whom, and for what purpose. From a critical perspective, the class should work with the concept of author-ship so that learners can become authors themselves, writing texts that hold

connection with the activities of their daily academic life (Halliday, 1991, p. 13).Authorship is the writers prerogative and responsibility to choose the aim, thecontent and style, the readership of the text (Ivanic, 1998, pp. 26, 219, 341).

Observation of genre systems and sets (activities, roles and relations that me-diate language) in specific contexts (lab activities, classes, office hours, researchgroup meetings, etc.) should inform language pedagogy. Genre pedagogy involves a debate over the production, distribution and con-sumption of texts. It is important that learners and teachers get to know (or learn

to explore) the social situation of the relevant genres of each target-community,by asking questions such as the ones listed here. Educating students about the uses of language in specific academic contextsdepends on clear identification of the connections between text and their sur-


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rounding circumstances. Tere seems to be three great challenges in academicwriting teaching that genre pedagogy can respond to: novice writers need tounderstand what genre is and how it functions, teachers have to effectively teachsomeone how to engage in the genres that constitute academic life, and novice

writers must take part in the discourse of science.

NOTES

Tis work was supported by grant n 304256/2004-8 from the BrazilianResearch Funding Agency (CNPq). Te idea for this work resulted from myparticipation in the panel Challenges in genre analysis and genre teaching, atthe ABRAPUI International Conference, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais,Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil, June 4th, 2007; and in the Writing Research Across

Borders Conference, University of California Santa Barbara, CA, USA, Febru-ary 24, 2008. Parts of this work have appeared in Motta-Roth (2007). 1I thank my colleague Vera Menezes de Oliveira e Paiva from the FederalUniversity of Minas Gerais, Brazil, for calling my attention to this point. 2I should point out that Bazerman does not see the linkage between text andcontext as determinative and tight as Halliday and Martin do (see mutuallypredictive cited above). For him, text and context are dynamically interactive,so one needs to understand both in order to understand either fully. Predict-

ability of course does increase with the stability and pervasiveness of particularpractices of text and situation typification, but always creativity, novelty andlocality of meaning, and polysemiousness work against simple predictivity ineither direction. Te situation does not define exactly what to say and whateveris said always modifies the situation, as does the uptake. (Bazerman, personalcommunication, July 27, 2008) 3Immunodepressed:Patient whose immunologic system has been effectedby disease or treatment. Candidemia: Yeast infection. Amphotericin B:Fun-

gicide agent, a powerful antibiotic drug used in yeast infection treatments.Pharmacological Parameters:Dimensions or ways of measuring or predictingthe response of a patient to the properties and actions of a drug.Breakpoint:Condition(s) that determine(s) when a treatment must be interrupted. Source:Te On-line Medical Dictionary (http://cancerweb.ncl.ac.uk/omd/); StedmansOnline Medical Dictionary, 27th Edition (http://steadmans.com/), retrieved on

June 14, 2006.

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Genre in a Changing World Academic Writing Motta Roth